


A Right Perfect Knight

by theoldgods



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Community: got_exchange, Drunkenness, F/M, Gambling, King's Landing, Loyalty, M/M, Pre-Canon, Robert's Rebellion, Sex Work, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-12
Updated: 2014-11-12
Packaged: 2018-02-25 01:46:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2604065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theoldgods/pseuds/theoldgods
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No longer entirely sure of who they are in a post-Targaryen world, Davos and Stannis attend Robert’s wedding to Cersei in King's Landing, a hive of alcohol, gambling, and prostitution that may or may not help them get the gist of what the future can hold for the heir to the Iron Throne and an upjumped smuggler with the loosest tongue in the Crownlands.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Right Perfect Knight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [EmynIthilien](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EmynIthilien/gifts).



> Originally written for emynithilien for the 11th round of got_exchange on LJ, for the prompt “Stannis and Davos: Something precanon, such as....Davos attending Robert’s wedding at Stannis’s insistence...I’d like to see a focus on how the Stannis/Davos dynamic that we see in canon develops." Many thanks to that community for always being such a hive of interesting fic!
> 
> Note that this contains brief threats of rape to a sex worker.

“Don’t get caught,” Marya had murmured to him in bed the night before he left. 

“I’m attending a wedding, or so I thought.” Her skin was soft against his. “A very important wedding, where I’ll sit with the other servants, mayhaps ask my lord if he wants me to fetch him his clean shirts.”

She smothered her laughter against Davos’s shoulder. “He’d throw you out of the sept on your backside. This is what I mean: don’t get caught doing anything crude.”

“I’ll be a right perfect knight, see if I’m not,” he’d replied. “Not a toe out of line, not for my lord.” Her laughter had only intensified.

He was thus partly amused and partly embarrassed to find himself, two minutes after arriving in King’s Landing, already arguing with a scantily-clad woman in a doorframe. Well, arguing wasn’t quite the word for it—ignoring several feet of bare skin was more in line with what he was doing. _Arguing_ better fit his behavior with the guard behind him, who had his dirk to the woman’s neck and his hand against her cunt.

“I’m not _free_ ,” the woman snapped as he pressed his knife more tightly against her skin, “and I don’t play with knives. That’s Flora.” 

“Not even for the brother of the king?” The guard moved his body closer, blocking off her route of escape. “I don’t think _all_ the Targaryens liked getting rid of the First Night, darling, and my lord’s grandmama was a dragon.” 

“ _My lord_ hunts Targaryen babies in his sleep of late,” Davos remarked, pushing the guard away from the woman with his good hand, “and I very strongly doubt this is my lady’s first night.”

“What, she your wife, Master Onion?” another guard asked as the first sheathed his dagger.

“I could be,” the woman said as her skirts settled back against her legs. “Mayhaps for a discount, this one being so lordly brave, like a thrice-damned song.”

“I’ve a Lady Onion of my own already, and baby onions to boot. You’ve the wrong stag, my lady.” Davos plucked at the emblem above the onion on his surcoat. “His Grace’s men would tumble you in a second, but we belong to my lord of Dragonstone, and he does not like whoring.”

“His Grace has a pretty blonde whore of his own, soon to be chief of us all. Whoremongers across the city are wearing black today. We’ll take custom where we find it, ser.”

“I’m no knight,” Davos began, before remembering that was now a lie. “I’m from here, anyway.”

“Sweet Ser Florian of Flea Bottom?” She cocked an eyebrow. “This is turning _better_ than a song.” 

“We’ll be late, onion.” Lord Stannis’s household guards had all passed this sideshow by then, including the would-be rapist, and the second guard was rubbing his sweaty palms against his thighs. “Lord Stannis or the queen of the slums—choose one.”

“Why, my lord, of course.” Davos winked at the woman before he could stop himself and started on his way up the street. “I’d try after the feast, my lady,” he called over his shoulder.

She flipped up her skirts once more before disappearing.

* * *

“I hear you cannot keep your nose out of a whore’s troubles, Ser Davos.”

The anteroom to the Great Hall was both loud and hot, filled as it was with noise spilling over from the wedding feast. Davos had come out here in search of fresher water than what was being served in the bowels of the hall and had found his young liege lord sitting on a bench with his eyes closed, a rigid position he held as he spoke.

“I was only enacting your justice, my lord. No whores or rape for the men of House Baratheon—one branch of it, anyway.”

“Your tongue is the loosest in the Crownlands, ser.” Stannis peered at him from beneath hooded eyelids. “Yet perhaps also the truest. Justice is meted out from the lords to their people. She belongs to Robert, though the Father only knows if my brother even remembers that he _has_ such a thing as a people he owes a duty to. Judging by the rumors of his own whoring, he does not.”

Davos resisted the urge to shrug. “I am higher than her in some regard, or at least my title says as much. It was easy protection.” After a moment he added, “She would not have cost the cheap lout much if he had wanted to have her properly, and her breasts reminded me of Marya’s. Or any woman I knew in Flea Bottom.”

Stannis shivered. “Your lady is _your_ lady, Ser Davos, not mine. I am not a grasping dragonlord; I have no interest in my courtiers, never mind their wives.”

“Velaryon and Bar Emmon will be pleased, my lord.”

Stannis snorted. “Nothing a Baratheon could do would please them—I should be glad they are not Darrys, though I would give much and more to have Willem Darry’s head beneath an axe for treason. That would be a better use of my time than waiting for my drunken brother and his queen to be stripped naked for the court’s pleasure.”

“The lady Cersei is very beautiful, my lord,” Davos said, transferring his gaze to the ceiling to avoid the rawness that lurked from time to time in Stannis’s eyes. “I am certain she will give His Grace many children, more than enough to overshadow any last sprogs of dragon floating around the world. Wherever Willem Darry took the last Targaryens, they can’t matter for long.”

“Faith and hope are no doubt godly attributes, Ser Davos. You are certainly more sanguine than my brother, who roars for dragon blood during many of his sober hours.” Stannis’s sigh was stifled but still faintly audible over the sounds of the hall. “Worst of all, he is not entirely wrong. Rebellions have started over less than two trueborn heirs.”

“We have just had a rebellion, my lord.” At times, as awful as it was, Davos could feel himself talking to one of his infant sons while he spoke to Stannis—undoubtful treason to think, but an unbidden truth nonetheless. Somewhere in the back of his head, after all, were the two bright blue eyes of Stannis Baratheon, middle child and lord of nothing, shining with desperation as he wiped Davos’s blood from a butcher’s knife. “Darry sits somewhere—the bottom of the Narrow Sea, mayhaps—with two stolen babies while the hero Robert Baratheon has the Iron Throne and is now taking the gorgeous daughter of the wealthiest man on the continent. He has more houses bowing to him everyday, one of the realm’s wisest men as his chief counselor—” 

“One baby brother in his ancestral seat and another holding a rock against the return of those stolen dragons.”

Davos bit his lip. Before he could reply, however, the door opened and a blond head appeared.

“My lord. Ser…Davos, was it?” 

The songs claimed that Jaime Lannister had a smile far more wicked than any of Davos’s and a voice as golden as his hair. Tonight he was as pale as Stannis, however, his face doughy in contrast to his gleaming white Kingsguard armor.

“Ser Jaime the Kingslayer.”

“Good-brother.” Taunting put a splotch of color into Jaime’s cheeks, though his eyes remained hard. Stannis grit his teeth, no doubt remembering all over again why they were there. “His Grace has just informed me that if we wait much longer for the bedding, he will be too drunk to do his marital duty by my sister.”

“The succession awaits,” Davos remarked. “Time to put the ghosts of Targaryen past to rest, my lord?” 

“If Robert is lucky.” The expression on Jaime’s face was part jape, part disgust. Stannis was all sourness as he soldiered past him into the hall in silence, leaving Davos and Jaime to follow. “Were you drunk on your wedding night, Ser Davos?”

Marya had laughed so _hard_ with him, at him; he had felt his body float to the surface of the beer they’d drank (and drank, and drank). When he’d buried himself into her flesh—mouth, fingers, cock—much had gone black, a haze of minimal remembrance that was one of his greatest regrets.

“A little, ser.”

Robert began the call for the bedding as they entered. That was a job more traditionally given to someone aside from the bride or groom, Davos suspected—though this was, after all, the first proper wedding he had ever attended, so perhaps some of the niceties of etiquette were beyond him—but Jaime remained impassive in white at his sister’s side, Tywin Lannister was a block of ice, and Stannis had already disappeared. 

The rush of women was surprisingly strong; that men wanted a piece of the infamous beauty of Cersei Lannister was no surprise, but Davos had forgotten the appeal that Robert Baratheon’s black hair, blue eyes, and broad shoulders must have. Robert’s hoots and ribald cursing resounded through the hall; occasionally Cersei would reply to her tormentors with a sharp, commanding cry that only seemed to stoke the frenzy. Jaime followed the hordes as king and wholly naked queen were borne toward the exit, his eyes shuttling back and forth between his sister’s pale, laughing face and the hands that cupped her breasts.

The hall was calmer after their departure, though still littered with those too righteous or drunk to undress their monarchs. Davos recognized few of them aside from Tywin Lannister, now staring into middle ground after his departed son and daughter, and ducked out the hall to avoid being asked questions. One of Jaime’s Kingsguard brothers was standing guard outside the door; his fingers, curled loosely around his sword, tightened as Davos passed. 

* * *

The pull of the commons was always stronger for Davos after alcohol, and it wasn’t hard to find himself wrapped in a cloak, watching two men dice at the remains of an old gaming table. The game had attracted several spectators, who put down enough coin to keep the barkeeper from complaining at the noise they made. It had also attracted a host of women, one of whom put her hand against Davos’s neck, startling him from his boozy reverie.

“My Onion Lord of Flea Bottom.” 

Her eyes glittered in the gloom. Davos, aware of glances turning in his direction, drew his cloak more tightly around him to cover the stag he was suddenly hyperaware of on his chest.

“Where’s the groom of the hour? Why aren’t you with him?”

Davos swallowed. “I would not know, my lady—with his bride, the last I saw.” 

“Is that so?” Her voice was lighter and warmer than he remembered from earlier that day, tickling his ear. “I guess that’s why the palace is callin’ up a few whores to warm his bed?” 

“What, and you’re one of them?”

“Me?” Her grin was lopsided. “Nah, not the likes of me, not for the king and his men. Maybe his lady too; her grace the new queen is uncommon pretty, don’t you think? Maybe she likes cunt as much as the king.” 

“She is most beautiful, as befits a queen,” Davos answered. His attention was drifting back to the game again, as he was unable to care whether or not Robert and his men shared a hundred whores, even on his wedding night. The king did what the king did, regardless of whatever honor a man like Lord Stannis thought he ought have—that was the way of nobles, Davos had come to see over the past months. “Did you want something?” 

“Not with a married man who can’t hardly spare a lustful thought even for a pretty queen lying with another woman.” She sat down next to him on the bench, forcing his eyes back on her. “Girl’s got to eat, though, Lord Onion.”

He was drunk enough that his first thought was to offer to buy her a plate of food, a suggestion that died in his throat at her glare as he reached for his purse. “I’m not a whoremonger.”

She laughed. “I don’t need a whoremonger, Florian. I need men who pay.” In a whisper she added, “Mayhaps Lord Stannis?”

His spine stiffened, even as he found himself simultaneously choking back laughter. “Let’s go out,” he murmured, gently pushing her away from him.

It was cool outside, the night sky lost in a smattering of clouds twining in and around pinpricks of stars. The street itself was surprisingly quiet, considering the noise coming from the pubs set every few yards. Across the way two rats were scrabbling amongst the dirt in front of one tavern while voices screamed praises of Robert and Cersei. 

“You weren’t paying attention this afternoon, were you?” Davos asked after a few moments’ silence between them. “My lord of Dragonstone does not like whoring, or his men doing it.” When she did not immediately reply, he brushed fingers against her chin. “Or did you think I truly spoke from the goodness of my heart when I told that lout to get lost?”

“Noble nobles are too much to ask, I know,” she replied, meeting his eyes, “but you _are_ from the Bottom, I see it now. Foolish drunk, to wear your lord’s clothes out with a bunch of drunk commoners, but common yourself nonetheless still, to forget you were wearing them. No,” she added, as he adjusted his cloak again, “you’re still common. No lapdog I’ve ever fucked would move a finger to save a whore just because his lord asked it of him.”

“I’m not,” Davos said, as his heart beat low in his throat. “My liege lord is Stannis Baratheon, brother to the king. H-he knighted me.”

“Aye, and for how many years before that were you common?”

 _The past does not matter._ He would have said it aloud, were it not for the horrible way in which his stomach clenched at the thought. _Marya is the past too._ In answer he thrust his shortened fingers before her.

“I stole a thousand onions for the starving brother of a rebel lord. I did it for the money, the same any person from Flea Bottom would. In return I lost every finger on one hand, instead of my head. It was mercy.” 

“You saved the arse of the king’s brother and lost half a hand in return.” The woman shook her head. “That’s cruel, not just. _This_ is noble madness, my Florian. If you wait long enough, I think you’ll get that hard, proud nobility all over you seem to want so bad.”

“It wasn’t…” How did one explain what it was like to demand something of a boy lord— _only if you take it yourself, my lord—_ and actually get it? How did he tell a whore what it felt like to watch some barely-a-man with the most absurdly stern blue eyes cut off half his hand with a cleaver and know that it had been the boy’s first kill and the first time he himself had willingly submitted to a noble? “It was what I deserved. A knighthood and future honor for my boys for saving his life; my hand for breaking the law. All things piece by piece, as they come. Fairness. For the first time in a long time, fairness. No other lord would have done it. Any other lord could have demanded my head.” He took a long, hard breath and whispered, “I had expected it, to lose my head. Money or a loss of my head—it did not matter to me. They are the same. _You_ know that.”

She was quiet for a long minute, watching one rat chase the other into a nearby alley. “Family man with a death wish. Men _do_ tell all sorts of things to their whores.” 

“You’re not my—I’m not your—” 

“No,” she agreed. “You are his. Men do worse than follow their fingers.” When he sputtered in reply, she continued, “Go home, sweet Florian. Flea Bottom is not yours any longer.” She kissed his cheek and turned away.

“What’s your name?” he called after her. 

“I think tonight I’ll be Jonquil. Who are you?”

A number of names flit through his head, but in the end only one seemed right anymore.

“Ser Davos Seaworth. Of Flea Bottom.”

Jonquil smiled as she disappeared back into the pub.

* * *

Davos’s path back to his hostel was slow and meandering, his steps staggering with drink. _I don’t have a_ home _anymore. I don’t have a_ hand _anymore. I traded them for honor and duty_.

The hostel itself was quiet, for a night when the lower city was a riot of drunkenness. He slid inside with only a mild sense of unease at the lack of guards and toppled up the stairs to his shared garret. The man standing alongside the bed, however, was not one of his roommates.

“You are late, Ser Davos. I expected my men to bring me your corpse.”

“A cheerful thought, my lord.” Drink did not control his troublemaking instincts, it seemed. “What do I owe the pleasure to? If I’d known I was expected—”

“You weren’t, Ser Davos, so there is no second half to that sentence.” Stannis’s lips were pursed. “I am here because it is not the Red Keep.”

“If there is trouble with His Grace—”

“There has never not been trouble with His Grace, Ser Davos. I will lend you a history book if you do not already know that.”

“My pardons, my lord, but unless you offer me a maester to go with it, it will make no difference. I cannot read.” 

Stannis paused in his pacing of the room, turning to stare at Davos. “For one so loose lipped, you do always make me forget you were commonborn.”

“I am glad you forget, my lord. I never can.” Before he could stop himself, he continued, “I don’t want to.”

 _That is a bridge too far,_ Davos realized the moment the words passed his lips. Stannis’s eyes were curiously overbright, however, full more of something he would have called _confusion_ , in a lesser man, than any rage. 

“You are the most insolent man I have ever met,” Stannis said at last. “And yet I find that is what saved my life and my duty last year. If you have...friends...you would see here, Ser Davos, see them tomorrow. My brother saw fit to tell me, in his cups tonight, that I will be his master of ships. I have things I would ask you in a day’s time about the harbor of King’s Landing.”

Stannis moved toward the door; Davos took a seat on the battered straw mattress, before opening his mouth. 

“Dragonstone is a great honor, made for the heir to the Iron Throne. It takes a strong man to rule it and its dragonlords, they say, even in peacetime.”

Stannis paused in the doorway, his shoulders tensed. “I did not ask to be the heir to the Iron Throne until my brother’s wife pushes out children, no more than I asked for my brother to rebel against a mad king or for a smuggler to bring me a boatload of onions. I did not ask for anything I have been given these last years.”

“Nor did I, my lord. The stag killed the dragon, so there you have it. All stags must follow.”

“And all onions.” Stannis snorted. “Save me your poetry, Ser Davos. Bring me counsel instead, the day after this one, in the Red Keep. I will not keep you longer than I must.”

“Counsel from a smuggler, my lord?” 

“Counsel from a man who knows the harbors of Westeros better than any, to the man who must now help rule entirely too many of them.” 

Davos flexed his finger stumps and smiled. “My mind is yours, my lord of Dragonstone.”

The bunched shoulders relaxed as Stannis closed the door behind him.


End file.
